Open Writing

The big decisions for me in this era were to major in English and also that I needed to change my approach to work. I felt that I was too critical, unnecessarily competitive, that I didn’t like the person I was becoming and wanted to change. I didn’t understand this at the time but was entering a fairly prolonged period of mid-life crisis.

It’s sometimes known as the male menopause, and people laugh at this description, but it’s a confidence-shattering time for some men and we struggle to find the way ahead.

My approach was to share the little power I had with my colleagues and involve them in decisions. This way our decisions were made jointly and all defended them and tried to make things work.

I tried to create situations where people gained from their interaction with me, as I gained also from them. This win-win culture prevented the development of a situation where about 200 colleagues or rivals wanted to do a hatchet job on me at the first opportunity. In retrospect, I can see that it was enlightened self interest to behave this way but I got there through feelings rather than rationally working it out. Intuition and gut feeling served me well. The heart has its reasons that reason can never understand, a philosopher once said.

I reached a situation where I felt I could get anything done at work, whatever the other officer’s duty statement stipulated. For instance, I had a tea lady writing stories for the staff social magazine. It cost the department nothing but I gave her a by-line and this made her famous internally. Also, I mentioned in her introduction, that she had been brought up in the bush and held a licence to drive a truck, which was why pushing the tea trolley was no problem. Her name was Agnes, which she hated. I always called her Blue. She liked that.

I got girls from finance and records to model in the promotion of safety procedures. One girl posed in halter top and tiny shorts trying to pull Main Roads safety boots off a worker and he didn’t want to let them go. This campaign got the workforce out of thongs and into safety boots. Work stoppages through foot injury declined immediately. All the guys on bush contract work wanted to meet the girl when they came to head office.

I found I could get more done with this new approach and that people enjoyed working with me.

By the time I had completed the degree, I was enormously relieved but realised that I had wrecked my health with excessive amounts of study, too much alcohol and not enough exercise.
In my final year, my tutor, a Ph D from having written a book on Henry James, told me I hadn’t a clue. He may have been right because I was losing interest fast but I did get a B in the final exam to complete my bachelor’s degree. It was a lousy third year, poorly organised with students not turning up to the tutorials and me, having turned up and done the homework, becoming a scapegoat.

Alex was working almost full time at the West Australian. We solved the problem of Leon coming home from school to an empty house by hiring the people next door to look after him until we got home about 6 pm.